I got curious and checked out the story of ‘Oar’. Skip Spence just out of a mental ward. The album’s legacy lives on. From the authoritative Wikipedia:

“In 1999, the Birdman label of Burbank, California released a tribute album titled More Oar: A Tribute To The Skip Spence Album. It featured covers of the original record’s tracks by Robert Plant, Robyn Hitchcock, Tom Waits, Greg Dulli, Mark Lanegan, Beck, Diesel Park West, Mudhoney, and others.”

Also:

“In November 2009, as part of his “Record Club” series, Beck began posting the videos of his complete version of Oar on his website (www.beck.com), recorded with members of Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell, James Gadson, Brian LeBarton, and others the previous June.”

You don’t get stuff like this on any other Delaware political blog. Nor should you.

I’ve got the album if you want to give it a listen. It’s a complete mess.

For those who don’t know, Skip Spence was the original drummer for Jefferson Airplane. He left to help form Moby Grape, where he sang and basically fronted the band as part of a three-guitar attack.

Here he is with Moby Grape before his breakdown, out front for “Hey Grandma.” (Point of reference for the kidz: There was a brief trend of hippie chicks wearing granny dresses and glasses, which prompted this song by Skippy.)

For those wondering, the link between the Elevators and Skip Spence is mental illness. Roky Erickson of the Elevators, in the words of Wikipedia: “In 1968, while performing at HemisFair, Erickson began speaking gibberish. He was soon diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sent to a Houston psychiatric hospital, where he involuntarily received electroconvulsive therapy.”

The term Garage Band is a sad invention of 50yo’s (at the time) who were attending a PBS Peter, Paul, and Mary fundraiser, yes the overweight and the balding. Amidst claims of having attended Woodstock( 43 million honk boomers claim to have attended Woodstock) smoked pot on the school bus in middle school and to have had intercourse for the first time at age 13, these attendees also coined the Garage Band Moniker.

I was referring to the national use of the term which is fairly recent. Tom Petty is frequently mentioned in “Garage Band” terminology, something that annoyed him as a felt he was a serious Musician by his teens rehearsing in clubs and studios. If you move to Florida you will meet hundreds, if not thousands of people who claim to have known Tom Petty or watched at him bars. A subset of the Woostock phenomena. I was only having fun with an overworked term and not meaning anything personal. I can remember some of the local “band scene” in Wilmington where basements also were used for practicing.

During the 1960s garage rock was not recognized as a distinct genre and had no specific name, but critical hindsight in the early 1970s—and particularly the release of the 1972 compilation album Nuggets—did much to define and memorialize the style. Between 1971 and 1973 certain rock critics began to retroactively identify the music as a genre and for several years used the term “punk rock” to describe it, making it the first form of music to bear the description, predating the more familiar use of the term appropriated by the later punk rock movement of the mid- to late-1970s that it influenced. The term “garage rock” came into use at the beginning of the 1980s and eventually gained favor amongst devotees. The genre has also been referred to as “’60s punk”, “garage punk”, or “proto-punk”.

If you enjoy such music — I find I can take about an hour and then need a break — you would enjoy Van Zandt’s syndicated Underground Garage radio show. WMGK airs it out of Philly at 10 p.m. Sundays.

I’ll bet those Petty fans like to say Mudcrutch was better than the Heartbreakers. If you’re a Florida man (not the one from all the headlines) you probably liked that tribute at the Gators game, when the whole crowd sang “I Won’t Back Down.”